Tiz's Minis

This should of been so easy!!

So the Ignition Coil has gone, fix that and I'm up and running.

Attempt 1
I raided the coil off the other mini. OK, ten minutes later the coil was swapped, time to switch on. Nothing! Five minutes of fiddling about and I'd managed to get the thing started, great lets give it a go. Two hundred meters down the road it died on me. I thought of pushing it back up the hill, decided against it and towed it back again.

There was no way this car was going to start again today. I begin to have doubts about the state of the spare coil. I'd run out of time, I was needed elsewhere, failed!!!

Attempt 2
I'd brought a brand new Lucas Sports coil, a sports coil was chosen as it has a much higher output, a friend had also told me that if I want to change to electronic ignition the sports coil would be better.

First problem. I'd brought a coil designed for use in a car without a ballast resister, my car uses a ballast resistor. The Internet Mini Encyclopedia has an explanation on how a ballasted system works and how to remove the ballast wire. I followed the instructions in the article with a couple of changes. My fuse box had a spare terminal on position 1 of the fuse box so I was able to connect to it directly, no horrible splicing to the loom. The existing ballast resistor connection also has the wire from the solenoid attached. I figured I didn't need either wire so I simply taped them out the way and replaced them with my 12v feed. I also too the opportunity to replace the dodgy looking connectors on the negative connection to the coil.

Ok, lets give it a try. It did, after a bit of fiddling, start, and on that occasion it fired straight away. Having learnt from my previous experience I decided to try initially to move the car around the car park rather than take it out on the road. I couldn't believe it, it died almost straight away. It was getting dark now, time to go. Failed again!!!

Attempt 3
I'd gone away and thought about it, the only thing I'd not checked was the low tension side, the wire from the condenser to the negative terminal on the coil and the very flimsy looking cotton covered wire that links the base plate of the dizzy to earth. After checking with my multimeter I could find no continuity problems on either. I put it all back together again, making sure each connection was good and tried again. This time it started first time, I wiggled everything that would wiggle and it didn't fail. Took it on a test run and covered about ten miles with no problems. I'd call that fixed. I can only summise there was a connection that was failing. The new ignition coil is brilliant, I've never had the car starting so well. Third attempt, success!!

posted by Andy Tyrrell @ 2:04 PM